Paraesthesia: .NET Development and Some Pictures of My Cat

Cats + Audio = Expensive

I
love my two cats, but the little Siamese-tabby mix Jack is pretty
aggressive and he’s been chasing my other cat Xev around a lot,
particularly in the last, oh, month or so.

Yeah, you’d never guess that from the picture, right?

Okay, so a couple of weeks back, it’s business as usual - Xev is yowling
because Jack is riding her back around the house. (Yes, he’s fixed.
They both are. He’s just being an asshole.) They make a mad dash out
from behind the couch and…

SLAM!

I turn to see that one of the stands with one of my Bose Acoustimass
16
cubes has been knocked over and the two cubes that make up the speaker
have come apart from each other at the part where they swivel.

Looking at the mechanism that was exposed, it looks like the thing
literally just snaps together. Unfortunately, the way it snaps together
is so tight and fits together in just such a way that there’s really no
way you can just snap it back together. I can see that the assembly of
the two cubes actually happens pretty early in the manufacturing process
because it looks like the two cubes would need to be snapped together
before the speaker bits got inserted. The speakers proper still work,
the cubes just aren’t attached anymore.

I tried everything short of actually disassembling the damn thing, but
it was no use. I ended up taking it to a repair shop who specializes in
this sort of thing and it turns out the speakers aren’t field
serviceable. Of course they’re not. Instead, they have to order me a
replacement, and that’s going to cost me - wait for it - $151.
That’s one-hundred-and-fifty-one American dollars. That’s in addition
to the $25 I already paid them to look at the thing for me (some of
that is credited toward the total cost of the speaker, bringing it
down to $151).